Saturday School Podcast

Saturday School from the Potluck Podcast Collective

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Wake up! Saturday School is a podcast where Brian Hu (@husbrian) and Ada Tseng (@adatseng) teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. New episodes released Saturdays at 8am, when all your friends are still in bed watching...Show More

Season 6 of Saturday School (where we explore Asian films about Asian America) kicks off with us inviting one of our favorite people to talk about one of our favorite actors. Journalist Angilee Shah thought we were joking when we asked her to join us...Show More

It's our Season 5 finale of Saturday School, and in some ways, it's all been leading to the most famous Asian American of all time: Bruce Lee. In this episode, we discuss his films "The Big Boss" from 1971 and "Way of the Dragon" from 1972, as a way ...Show More

This is the 9th (and 2nd to last) episode of our 5th season of Saturday School, and those who've been there with us from the beginning can probably tell that we start to get a little senioritis-y at this point in the semester.
So in this episode, a...Show More

Thanks to film programmer, producer, YOMYOMF writer Aimee Anderson for being our guest on this week's episode of Saturday School.
This semester, we're exploring Asian Americans in Asia, and this week, we're talking about the 2007 film, "The Rebel," ...Show More

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're revisiting one of Asian America's rare historical epics: Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall fr om 2006. There's really no other film like it. It's the story that starts with the Fall of Saigon and trace...Show More

In this week's Saturday School, we revisit the 2015 film Seoul Searching, which follows a group of teenagers sent by their parents to a government-sponsored summer camp in Korea for them to reconnect with their roots. However, according to the film's...Show More

After a few weeks of exploring the grittier, more traumatic side of Asian Americans in Asia, this week's episode of Saturday School is a little more light-hearted and fun. We're revisiting the 2011 documentary "Big in Bollywood," which follows Omi Va...Show More

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we're revisiting the 2005 thriller "Cavite" by Ian Gamazon and Neil dela Llana, which is a unique take on our exploration of Asian Americans in Asia. The film basically takes all the anxieties Asian American...Show More

This week's episode, as part of our season on Asian Americans in Asia, we revisit the 2003 documentary "Refugee," by Spencer Nakasako, which follows three Cambodian American young men as they go back to Cambodia for the first time to confront their f...Show More

The second episode of Saturday School (Season 5) on Asian Americans in Asia is about the 2000 documentary "First Person Plural" by Deann Borshay Liem. It's a personal documentary about a Korean American adoptee who comes to realize she's not the pers...Show More

Saturday School - our podcast where we force your unwilling children to learn Asian American pop culture history - is back for Season 5, and this semester, we are exploring films that involve Asian Americans in Asia.
We start with a 1957 episode of...Show More

For all you overachievers out there, Saturday School hosted an AP Honors discussion group with 5 people who have seen Crazy Rich Asians in theaters 5 TIMES *OR MORE.* The #CRA5timersclub. Like the SNL 5-timers club, but more Asian. Spoilers galore. A...Show More

It's the last episode of Saturday School Season 4, our exploration of Asian American troublemakers in film, and we don't want to say we saved the "best" for last, but we definitely saved the most badass for last. This week, we're talking about 1965's...Show More

For Episode 9 of our season on Asian American Troublemakers, we revisit Jiyoung Lee's Female Pervert -- a film that we put at the top of our Asia Pacific Arts 2015 Best Asian American Films list, when 2015 was actually a really impressive year for As...Show More

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we're going back to 1993 to revisit Jon Moritsugu's Terminal USA, his over-the-top, grotesque, drug-filled take on a Japanese American sitcom family. Moritsugu plays dual roles: twins Katsumi, a punk drug de...Show More

Episode 7 of our season on Troublemakers, and we're looking at the 1997 Rea Tajiri film, Strawberry Fields, which was part of the Class of 1997 "Asian American New Wave," featuring debut works of directors like Justin Lin, Quentin Lee, Eric Nakamura,...Show More

Skipped school last week, but we're back - and this week's episode is about Harry Kim's 2008 documentary Dirty Hands: The Art and Crimes of David Choe. Artist David Choe is kind of the ultimate Asian American troublemaker in ways that are both empowe...Show More

We probably had a little too much fun with our latest episode of Saturday School as we continue to explore Asian American "troublemakers" in film. We look back at professor/filmmaker Nguyen Tan Hoang's experimental videos from the '90s and early 2000...Show More

Bonus episode of Saturday School this week, as we speak with director Bing Liu and producer Diane Quon about their Sundance Award-winning documentary Minding the Gap. In the film, Bing Liu documents the stories of a couple of his skateboarding friend...Show More

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're looking at Ravi Kapoor's 2015 film "Miss India America," a pageant comedy that we're arguing is the closest thing Asian America has to a heist film. But instead of stealing money, she's stealing the c...Show More

For Episode 3 of our season on troublemakers, we quickly review the history of Asian American male gangster films, before focusing on a pair of Byron Q-directed films that made us think of gangster films in a whole new way.
Bang Bang is a coming-of...Show More

Part of the reason we thought it'd be fun to do Season 4 of Saturday School on Troublemakers was to highlight some of the bad girls/bad boys of Asian American film, but another reason was to remind ourselves that the Asian American movement itself wa...Show More

We're back! Season 4 of Saturday School, we explore Troublemakers in Asian American Film History, inspired by film scholar's Eve Oishi's reference to "bad Asians," aka "badass Asians," in media. We're looking at a spectrum of "trouble," from renegade...Show More

This episode, with special guest Lee Ann Kim, was recorded live at the 2017 San Diego Asian Film Festival. Coming off our season on Asian American Music Movies, we talk about animated musicals like Mulan, Moana, and Ni Hao Kai Lan, before moving into...Show More

Our last episode of our season about Asian American music movies brings us full circle - from episode 1's "Cruisin' J-Town," produced by Visual Communications, co-founded by Robert Nakamura, to this week's episode about the 2009 documentary "A Song F...Show More

This week's episode is about Roddy Bogawa's autobiographical documentary "I Was Born, But..." which takes us on a journey from his childhood in Hawaii, to his involvement in the punk rock scene in the '70s, to his time as a filmmaker the early 2000s,...Show More

What started off as us planning to rattle off our favorite music videos turned into an epic history of the Asian American music video form, with much-needed help from our Potluck Podcast braintrust. Impress your friends with your knowledge of Asian A...Show More

We're doing something a little different for this week's episode: it'll be a two-part exploration of Asian American music videos. Next week, Brian and Ada will be picking a few of their favorite music videos to share with everyone -- so this week, we...Show More

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we revisit the 2006 documentary The Heavenly Kings, by Daniel Wu, about the time the Into the Badlands star was in a Hong Kong boy band with his friends. Sort of. We might have a little too much fun with th...Show More

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we talk about Kumu Hina, a 2014 documentary about Hina Wong-Kalu, a hula teacher at an elementary school in Hawaii that aims to preserve the indigenous culture to the younger generations. Kumu Hina, who iden...Show More

On this week's episode of Saturday School, we revisit the 2010 feature film The Taqwacores, which follows a group of characters living together in Buffalo, New York who are part of the Islamic punk scene. We laugh about how in Hollywood movies, the "...Show More

This week's episode looks at two documentaries about performers in the San Francisco Chinatown nightclub scene in the '30s and '40s: Arthur Dong's 1989 documentary "Forbidden City USA," about the nation’s premiere all-Chinese nightclub Forbidden City...Show More

This episode is a straight-up lovefest, as Ada and Brian invite Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza to talk about their first film, 2006's Colma: The Musical. This is Ada's third time interviewing them about the same movie, yet she learns so many new thing...Show More

We have a very unique musical for Episode 2 of our 3rd season about Asian American Music Movies. It's a 2001 turntablism musical, based on an album by legendary turntablist DJ QBert. Brian reminisces about growing up in the '90s in Cerritos, where th...Show More

We're back! Season 3 of Saturday School will be about Asian American music movies. There weren't enough Asian American musicals to make an entire season about "musicals," but expanding it to "music movies" allows us to include concert movies, films a...Show More

This bonus episode of Saturday School -- recorded at the Potluck Podcast Collective Lounge at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival with special guest Oliver Wang -- is the equivalent of summer cram session: while class is usually a swift 10-min affair,...Show More

This is our last episode of the second season, and we're ending it with a real life epic romance, told in the 2014 documentary Limited Partnership. It's the story of a Filipino American named Richard Adams; an Australian without a green card named To...Show More

"Falling in love at 18 is magic. Falling in love at 65 is a miracle." This week, we're talking about 1988's The Wash, starring Mako, Nobu McCarthy and Sab Shimono. It's the most excited Brian and Ada have ever been about discovering one of the greate...Show More

On this week's Saturday School, Brian admits that Mississippi Masala contains two types of storylines that he usually hates in Asian American film, but in this case, he's 100% on board. Related, Ada and Brian forget this is supposed to be an Asian Am...Show More

This week, we go way back in history, almost 100 years ago to 1919 and a silent film called The Dragon Painter, starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki. Hayakawa was a star rivaling Charlie Chaplin in the Silent Era, and after being tired of...Show More

You may know Steven Okazaki as an Academy Award-winning documentarian who's made very serious films about Japanese atomic bomb survivors (White Light/Black Rain, The Mushroom Club) or the Japanese American internment camps during WWII (Unfinished Bus...Show More

On this week's episode, we have a special guest: musician Goh Nakamura joins us to talk about the films Surrogate Valentine and its sequel Daylight Savings, directed by Dave Boyle. In both movies, Goh plays a version of himself as he travels around t...Show More

This week's episode is about Bertha Bay-Sa Pan's Almost Perfect from 2011, a romantic comedy starring Kelly Hu and Ivan Shaw. We've talked about how uncommon it is to have a fully-fleshed-out love story between two Asian American characters in film -...Show More

This week, we're talking about The Namesake, a 2003 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri that was later adapted into a 2006 feature film by director Mira Nair. The trailer makes it seem like the movie is mostly about the American-born son's character (played by Ka...Show More

In Episode 2 of our season of love, we revisit the 1998 documentary Kelly Loves Tony by Spencer Nakasako. Kelly and Tony, whose families are lu Mien refugees from Laos, live in Oakland, CA, and they've just graduated from high school. She's a good gi...Show More

Welcome back to Saturday School, the podcast where Brian Hu and Ada Tseng teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history! This season is all about "Asian Americans in Love," as we explore memorable Asian American onscreen roma...Show More

It's the last episode of the first season of our Saturday School podcast, aka the last "class" of our "semester" on Asian American comedy. We end with the 1998 film Shopping for Fangs, directed by Justin Lin and Quentin Lee, starring an ensemble cast...Show More

The one where class is canceled, Ada pretends it's because we all need a break for self-care, and Brian has been listening to too much "Yo, Is This Racist?" See you next week!
Saturday School is a podcast where we teach your unwilling children about...Show More

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're talking about the 1999 film Chutney Popcorn by Nisha Ganatra. It's about two sisters -- one who's devastated to learn she can't have children, and the other who contemplates being her surrogate mother...Show More

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we're talking about the 1999 film Catfish in Black Bean Sauce, a cross-cultural comedy written/directed/starring Chi Muoi Lo about a family of Vietnamese refugee kids adopted by African American parents. Br...Show More

For this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back to 1982 and Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, a film widely regarded as a pioneer of Asian American cinema. But for all it's critical acclaim and prestige, we look at the comedy and discuss why it's ...Show More

This week, we're talking about 2009's Fruit Fly, a comedy musical by H.P. Mendoza starring L.A. Renigan as Maribel, a performance artist living in San Francisco, making new friends and finding her way.
Brian learns that H.P. Mendoza comedies can ma...Show More

We have a very special episode of Saturday School this week, where we have guests! We recorded LIVE at the Comedy Comedy Festival earlier this year, and we invited director Michael Kang and his daughters Klee and Ryatt to talk about 1982's action com...Show More

Episode 4 of Saturday School is about a special film called Loins of Punjab Presents, a mockumentary about a Bollywood Idol singing competition in New Jersey. Ada learns that Brian likes any film with the word "loins" in it. (You're welcome, aspiring...Show More

In this week's episode of Saturday School, we go back a little further in time: to 1993 and Ang Lee's second film, The Wedding Banquet. It's a comedy of misunderstandings that lead to a fake wedding to placate Taiwanese parents who desperately want t...Show More

Get ready for Episode 2! You better have done your homework, which was to watch Jessica Yu's Ping Pong Playa from 2007, starring Jimmy Tsai. This week, Ada learns that Ping Pong Playa is about more than the comedy of grown men wearing short shorts, b...Show More

This is the official launch of our new podcast Saturday School, where we teach your unwilling children about Asian American pop culture history. First season will be about Asian American film comedies, and starting today, 10 episodes will be released...Show More